The DNA Olympics -- Jamaicans Win Sprinting 'Genetic Lottery' -- and Why We Should All Care

Jon Entine
, ContributorI write skeptically about science, public policy, media and NGOs.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Jon Entine, author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It," takes stock of the DNA London Olympics--where, as usual, African-descended athletes swept the running events while whites and Asians dominated in the water sports, field competition and strength events. What's going on here?

Usain Bolt leads the Jamaican relay team to Olympic gold and a world record

Segregation was on display in London over the past two weeks--which, surprisingly, should spark no concerns and may even help educate us all about the wonders of human biodiversity. Let me explain.

Led by 100-meter world record holder Usain Bolt, Jamaican men swept the sprinting events at the London Olympics. It was a stunning feat for the small Caribbean nation. But as part of a broader trend, it’s hardly surprising. Runners of West African descent are the fastest humans on earth.

For decades, a bushel of developing countries—Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts, Barbados, Grenada, Netherlands Antilles and the Bahamas in the Caribbean and Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Namibia in western Africa, as single countries, have each produced more elite male sprinters than all of white Europe and Asia combined. Yet West African descended runners are laggards at the longer races.

Remarkably, the story of East African runners is the mirror image of the West African success story. While terrible at the sprints, runners from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Somalia, along with a sprinkling of North and Southern Africans, regularly dominate endurance running.

And if you are an Asian or white runner? Forgetaboutit.

Unlike the props and costumes required for, say, fencing, or the intense coaching demanded of gymnastics, running requires only that you lace ‘em up. Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila proved this quite memorably in the 1960 Rome Olympics, when—shoeless, coachless and inexperienced—he won the marathon.

Running is a natural laboratory for the science of sports. It’s empirically driven. There are winners and losers. No soft-headed sociological mumbo-jumbo allowed.

The fact is, over the past fifty years, as the barriers to competition, at least for men, have gradually eroded, and equality of opportunity has steadily spread to vast sections of once poverty-stricken Asia and Africa, one might have expected that running results would have become more democratic. The medal podium should look like a rainbow of racial equality, a United Nations of sports. But just the opposite has happened.

The trends are eye opening: Athletes of African ancestry hold every major male running record, from the 100 meters to the marathon. (Although these same trends hold for female runners, the pattern is more dominant among male runners. This analysis focuses on men because the playing field for them is far more level, as social taboos remain that restrict female access to sports in many parts of the world.) Over the last seven Olympic men’s 100-meter races, all 56 finalists have been of West African descent. Only two non-African runners, France’s Christophe Lemaire, who is white, and Australia’s Irish-aboriginal Patrick Johnson, have cracked the top 500 100-meter times. There are no elite Asian sprinters—or, intriguingly, any from East or North Africa.